Dark blue and pale brown were on the spoke or wing adjacent. (Or did he only remember?) And on it lay the long point or brief rung of shade cast down through the capsule’s empty space by the now more leaning sliver Imp Plus had sprung.
Rung. He did not know rung. But with its cast shadow, it was an idea. Yet not like the green thing, the algae.
Though, like the green thing, someone else’s idea. But rung or not, Imp Plus had had the feel of that shadow across his seeing before: and now knew he had already known that the membranes were what he saw with. Though not eyes.
Sometimes he saw through; sometimes not.
If the news vendor kept his mouth open because he saw with his teeth, maybe the colored and discolored and loose and also absent teeth came and went and came again.
Beyond the ripple districts the membrane tissue began to fade.
The limbs were not all membrane. Their sticky shine was sometimes hard as plating.
One of the spokes seemed to move away from him, he was not sure. What could he do? But the center district between the green and dark red ripples was now bigger.
He felt under the membranes levels and laminations that he was going to see, and he could feel right down to the vegetative and animal poles of one cell lucky enough to be part of what the membrane was becoming part of.
Vegetative was not the vendor’s vegetable. Imp Plus did not know animal, but only recalled it. What could he do?
“Remember to survive of course.” That was what the Acrid Voice had said into the chalky greenboard in a pale green room as if he did not mean the words to go to Imp Plus. But remember what?
The woman at the California beach was all flesh. She stood straight against him and he forgot his ill body. Forgot the Mexican thorn that had cut his feet (near the silver-leaf flower that sprang up under the flashlight) — and the fingers that went away from his hand at the winter newsstand in which the hooded vendor with always open half-laughing mouth and rotten teeth had a bandage so loose you could see in one socket a pale red purse like a body hole. All came together loosely arrayed by a force. It was there and touched Imp Plus who could feel it but not reach it.
It was like an idea, other ideas besides resilience: like the resilience the strands were of — the strands in corners of all eyes loosening and tightening, loosening and (now he thought with the full closeness of his former look) losing a process of strand before tightening back. The chlorella bed had seemed to him an idea long ago. But then he tried to stop himself, for he did not know idea. He had recalled it; but he did not know it. He knew the green chlorella, knew that it gave him part of his air. Wasn’t that all? And now also knew that the spokes had membranes with sight. But he persisted in feeling that the spread and the poles and the open chances of this sight were more than sight and more than what they’d felt like.
Here in Earth orbit he leaned out in all the axes of his spines to this force that had him but that he had not learned to touch. The force was dispersed in the outlying parts. It was like an idea if Imp Plus only knew idea. It was the idea of his sight. Or the force of place where sight grew. Or the chance of place which force inclined to find. He leaned down the one axis of distance. But then he could not. For he had seen how he had slipped toward a secret he would have from himself, a secret kick he would have from himself by recalling the woman’s moist touch all round him by the body he once had had but did not now have. This secret leaning had seen itself, brain and limbs merging in a mutual inclination of sight, or change of chance: so the first leaning was displaced by the second leaning: this second leaning was not one axial incline but a spread from one of several possible centers, and a spread of the caving-pain that made him laugh back and budge the four outlying limbs or necks bedded with membranes and their growth and with that underlying offer feeling its way through their plasm. Before, from outside, his brain had been, he now saw, small or then huge only because motion in his membrane-sight had made that so. And what he’d thought to be sight projected solid toward the luminous vessel of brain was really a solid that happened also to have sight. And the shifting look of the brain-stuff as he’d leaned round and round the brain, was real change in the brain’s face.
But what could he do? What of the light? It had lessened. It still wound into all the parts like smoke into sinus. But the light had lessened.
He did not know. But he felt a lip of fold unwind that he could only have seen had he put himself forth onto an outlying limb membrane. And he wished not to do that. For the lowering Sunlight still warm in flood gave him a feel that was not alone the Sun’s movement but his too. A feel of many mouths opening that had not been before.
Imp Plus had laughed into the smiling mouth that had said, “Vanity.”
For he had seen through the glinting peeper of the dune: it was a shadow monitor, a person from the Project: so perhaps they had not implanted a monitor in his car that was drawn up at the end of the dune road.
But that was it! His slivers were electrodes! He had known them long ago. Though not where they’d be implanted.
For a moment the limbs or necks or wings seemed to know.
Know what?
Ground said Imp Plus should begin to think of getting ready for some shut-eye, but would Imp Plus please give latest glucose readings. And Imp Plus wondered Ground should say such things when Ground had never needed Imp Plus for such data.
Or had not till now, with the electrodes popping out.
The sliver that the brown woman had brought to his arm in California had been big and not small like the slivers here. Not an electrode. Though with a needle at one end.
Now the limbs or wings or necks or spokes pulsed a milky glow so the cycling of the late light received a salute.
Imp Plus knew that the more that was all around and was from him was growing from his brain.
6
It did not come to him. It went from him. He could not stop knowing that it was to be taken away from him.
If everything was to go away from him maybe it would go away after dark came. Through the lessening light he made out no change in the membrane spokes. Except what began to be a bend in one.
He saw that his sight was not shifting as frequently now from widespread haze to clear and back. And saw that while he was able to think his sight into his outlying limbs he did not.
Because he wanted not to. And the desire had outstripped the memory of why he’d wanted not to.
This thought turned into the caving and burned him inside out. Not on an outlying membrane but close to home, though with that same feel of being independent of him.
He had wanted to stay centrally put and not be dispersed into reaches of himself that were the unknown locus of the spokes. This thought had launched the growing pain all over again. Though it now ripped outward an inside he saw now was curious.
So he had to see it. As he’d seen the glial glue-blasts lapse into independent units of sponge which broke and were more glue-blasts than before. Likewise the fibers had pulsed sideways in the old eye tracts at whose head the fibers had been blocked by the emptiness where they’d been severed.
They pulsed sideways instead: into the temporal lobe, he thought.
Where Ground had given kicks, it said.
Which Imp Plus, said Ground, had given back in return in prefrontal areas 9 and 12. Taken in one place, given back in another.
Since the light was less, he did not have to see as much. So maybe he thought more.
What stopped him? Was he now his own sight? Yes, if he could consent to be dispersed. He could flow freely among the spokes forever. Or receive pulses from Ground as the three jettisoned slivers received from Ground waves of pulse like grasshopper elbows coming on the frequency like an absence of obstacle.